It's Miriam's (Elyssa Mersdorf)
21st birthday and her four friends Tanya (Torrey Weiss),
Cassy (Laurel Casillo), Mark (Morgan Hooper), and aspiring
filmmaker Leo (Ryan Maslyn) are joining her for a week at
her vacationing aunt's snowbound country home. As if
traveling for hours in a snowstorm were bad enough, they are
also stalked by a tinted van which nearly drives them off
the road and then follows them through town. Frazzled, they
arrive at the house only to find that the power is not
working, fortunately Miriam's Aunt Gail (Gail Cadden) drops
by to provide a false scare and turn on the juice. The next
day they go exploring and get lost in the woods, not making
it back to the house until well after nightfall. Their
dinner is disturbed by constant phone calls (with no one on
the other side of the line) and a videotape that turns up on
the doorstep. The tape appears to be photographed from
inside the van that has been following them. The group are
even more disturbed when the video not only shows that their
stalker has been peeking in through the windows, but has
also been in the house when they were asleep. They decide to
be smart and hightail it out of their only to discover that
their car is missing. When the phone goes dead and the power
goes out, they realize that barricading themselves in the
house may not sufficiently protect them from their unseen
assailant. For the most part, EVIL THINGS is a
well-made film. Comparisons to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
(seemingly self-slamming doors) and QUARANTINE (night
vision ending) are rather facile (it's pretty obvious that
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is the film's main
inspiration, along with perhaps ILS/THEM). The actors seem
to improvise well (except for the usual half-hearted "enough
with the camera" comments to the aspiring filmmaker
character who views everything through a video camera that
does not seem to require recharging), none of the characters
have "victim" stamped across their foreheads, and their
sometimes jerky behavior is mostly well-motivated. After a
nice build-up, the film stagnates a little with the long
sequence in the snowy woods, but picks up once they get back
to the house. The film next stumbles with the interjection
of distracting underscore at the point where the group view
the videotape that appears on their doorstep (it seems odd
to have music on found footage, but there is a reason).
While it gets some good mileage out of the darting
flashlights and frantic, roaming POV camera, the film's
stalk and chase climactic sequence is cut short (wasting the
opportunity to wring suspense out of the fates of three of
the five victims). The film runs 86 minutes but the end
credits start at roughly 75 minutes and are intercut with
the stalker's camera footage. This is an interesting
concept, and it would have been great had the footage
offered any new clues, but all of the footage during this
sequence is the stuff we've already seen on the videotape.
The five minutes sequence before the end credits of the
stalker apparently surreptitiously photographing other
student filmmakers in Central Park is atmospheric but feels
like padding. While not the sleeper pic it would like to be,
it is an interesting if not successful debut.

NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per
second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes.

Bitrate

Audio

English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo

Subtitles

none

Features

Release Information:
Studio: Inception Media Group

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen anamorphic - 1.78:1

Edition Details:
• Trailer (16:9; 1:50)

DVD Release Date: August 9th,
2011screener

Chapters 1

Comments

Inception Media's
screener features the trailer and the feature only. I am unsure
of how representative the watermarked, interlaced presentation
is of this HD production. The audio is 2.0 stereo, but the press
release says the final disc will feature 5.1 audio. No extras
are confirmed at this point.